


r/unresolvedmysteries

by iroirong



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Case Fic, Conspiracy Theories, Gen, Gotham City is Terrible, Government Conspiracy, Kidnapping, Locked Box Mystery, Minor Original Character(s), No Man's Land, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Outsider, Politics, Social Media, fair warning i did most of the formatting myself so i have NO clue what this looks like on mobile, not mobile friendly
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-18 21:42:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29615862
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iroirong/pseuds/iroirong
Summary: A 21-year-old political science student at Gotham Academy goes missing. Batman's on the case, but so is Reddit.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 28





	r/unresolvedmysteries

**382**

| 

[DISAPPEARANCE] A 21-year old political science student at Gotham University went missing. GCPD refuses to investigate her disappearance, possibly due to her ties to the Anti-Secession Campaign.

submitted 19 hours ago • by gothamlurkerthrowaway  
  
---|---  
  
Hey! Long-time lurker, first-time caller. I know there's been a deluge of posts about Gotham City cases recently, and I think everyone's sick and tired of debating on whether it was Mad Hatter or Professor Pyg to blame, but I think I have a local case that has nothing to do with supervillain activity for once. I'm using a throwaway because I go to the same school as Melinda Hernandez -- she's a friend of a friend of a friend, but we're not quite in the same circles -- and I've been following up on some of the investigations myself. Hopefully this post doesn't get too long, but I've tried to make this writeup as exhaustive as possible, especially since there isn't a lot of national coverage about this.

**Background**

There's been a secession campaign going on in Gotham ever since the late 80s, but it didn't really pick up steam until five years ago. You know, when the 7.6 scale earthquake hit. Only a couple of months after the Filovirus had broken out in Gotham, the city was devastated again with an earthquake around the same order of magnitude as the one in Haiti in 2010. The federal government did its best to evacuate the civilian population, but there were still plenty of people left behind in the city when they declared Gotham a "no man's land."

The US government destroyed all the bridges leading into and off of the island, trapping everyone who remained there behind a military blockade. Everyone still stuck in Gotham at the time was at the mercy of the gangs and supervillains, because, of course, every single supervillain ever broke out of Arkham at the same time. I can't begin to describe just what a hell on earth Gotham was for the months that we were in no man's land: it really felt like we were suddenly abandoned by the federal government.

For the record, I'm also anti-secession; I think it's a horrible idea, and considering how corrupt and blatantly shit this city is at running itself as a city, I doubt it'll do any better as a micro-country. But, I also totally get why people are pro-secession. I heard Bruce Wayne himself went to the federal government in an attempt to lobby for just any form of help and failed, and that man is one of the richest people in the country. I say "heard," because everyone in Gotham during the entire duration of the crisis had no wifi or cell service. All anybody knew was that the government abandoned us, and we were on our own.

Melinda would have been 15 at the time. She came from a lower middle class family on the west end of Uptown, right by Cape Canaveral. That means that she would have been closest to the Joker's territory, exposed more or less to the brunt of the gang warfare during the crisis, and basically on the opposite end of the island from where the GCPD were holding down land. The experience must have changed something in her because her parents report that after the earthquake, she became interested in politics. Her mother described her before as bright, but directionless; after the crisis, it seems she found somewhere to concentrate. When City Councilman Rudy Lieu ran for mayoral office four years ago, Melinda canvassed for him and really quickly, she started rising in the ranks. After Liu defeated Christopher Byrne in the general election, she signed on to become his intern and upon gaining admission to Gotham University on scholarship, she started working part-time as his junior aide.

Byrne ran on a platform that has become synonymous with secessionism in Gotham in general: one of his campaign promises was to invoke the Faulkner Act in his first week in office, and get a charter study commission to break Gotham City entirely apart from New Jersey, and thus the US as a whole. He was popular amongst the notoriously underfunded GCPD, who figured that if they backed the right guy, they could cash in with a new government willing to allocate whatever budget they wanted to the police force. When he lost, especially to Lieu, who has backed pay cuts for GCPD as a councilmember, they were pretty pissed.

In case you aren't from Gotham, you should know: the GCPD is also notoriously, hilariously, and undeniably corrupt. You can bribe a cop to get out of literally anything, and even when you pay them, they still barely ever do their job. There's a reason why Gotham also has the most vigilantes in it of any major US city, and it's because nobody wants to chase them out, considering how much more likely to get anywhere you are if Batman, Red Robin, or even the Red Hood takes an interest in your case. I'm not gonna lie, half the reason I'm even doing this write-up is on the off chance that one of our vigilantes is somehow on this sub. Anyways, with the background out of the way, let's get into the case.

**Friday, October 25th**

Lieu was up for reelection in November, so his whole staff had been working late nights for this month. Melinda was splitting her time now between her apartment, Gotham U, her on-campus job at the dining hall, and the campaign office, where, at some point, she came into contact with Henry Newmark. Newmark was a Gotham native and an assistant event coordinator who had since relocated to Bludhaven, but he was in town for the weekend helping to oversee the coordination of a non-partisan election day gala.

He and Melinda had apparently hit it off, arranging to meet up the next day for dinner at the hotel Newmark was staying at. That date would be the last time anyone ever saw Melinda Hernandez.

Curiously, when he was interviewed by the police, Newmark said that he never asked Melinda what her political affiliations or opinions were. Personally, this sounds like BS, especially because Newmark had expressed heavy support for the secession movement and specifically the GCPD on his Facebook page, having an uncle, Joshua Newmark, in the force. Call me biased, but there's no way Henry Newmark wasn't involved somehow in the disappearance of the junior aide for one of the most staunch anti-secessionist politicians in Gotham.

**Saturday, October 26th**

The reported timeline is as follows.

Melinda got home from class at roughly 4:10 PM. She told her roommates, Paromita Khandekar and Allison Jones, that she would be going out on a date later that night, and, as is usual for them, they set up a safe word system. Khandekar told the detectives in charge of the case that if Melinda had texted her "Is Angela home?" she would need picking up from the date immediately, something Khandekar stayed up late monitoring for.

Text records show that after Melinda left their apartment at roughly 8:30, she arrived at the location of the date -- the Marvin Hotel, just a few blocks away from the Gotham U campus -- and texted Khandekar at 8:56. I did the walk from the neighborhood their apartment was in to the Marvin and that part of the timeline more or less matched up. It only took me twenty minutes to get between the two locations on foot, but Melinda's description states that she's 5'2 and I'm nearly a foot taller, so those extra five minutes were probably just the difference in our stride.

Newmark made his way out of his room down to the lobby at 9:02. They met, chatted for a few minutes in the lobby, and then Newmark lead Melinda out the doors to the Mexican restaurant across the street. CCTV on the streets caught them leaving about an hour and a half later, at 10:41, though there weren't any cameras inside the restaurant. Witness testimony from their server, D (names redacted due to the waiter being a minor), pointed to it being a very normal first date, however. D didn't notice any signs of coercion or arguments, though he was also waiting several other tables at the same time, and it's possible he didn't catch everything.

At 10:52, Melinda texted Khandekar that she would be sleeping the night over and not to wait up for her. Khandekar stated that this wasn't the first time Melinda had slept the night with her first date and had assumed that Melinda was possibly looking for a one night stand as stress relief due to the fact that election night was coming up. Khandekar went to bed soon after this, thinking nothing amiss. After the fact, however, Jones added that it was somewhat strange that Melinda would choose to sleep over when she was scheduled for an early morning shift at the dining hall the next day.

10:54, Melinda Hernandez and Henry Newmark leave the hotel lobby and take the elevator to his room. They are seen walking down the hallway before disappearing into Newmark's room. Melinda Hernandez is never seen again.

**Sunday, October 27th**

Newmark is seen on hotel cameras leaving the room at 6:12 AM and checks out of the hotel at 6:24 AM. In a statement to police, he says that he left Hernandez in the room and wrote a note to her, explaining that she had the room until 10, while he had to get back to Bludhaven. He loaded a taxi with his suitcases and left the hotel at 7:00 on the dot, checking in at the event planning agency where he worked at 8:53. The drive from Uptown Gotham to Bludhaven usually only takes about an hour and a half when it's that early in the morning, especially since commuter traffic usually runs in the opposite direction, but Newmark stopped off at home to drop his stuff off before taking the bus to work. It looks like it was company policy to take the taxi, because RSVP Event Planners reimbursed Newmark the money for the ride, perhaps explaining why he took it all the way to his apartment, rather than stopping at his workplace, which was closer.

At the same time in Gotham, Melinda missed her shift, which started at 7:30. She was marked delinquent on the sheet, but it wasn't until about 10:15 when her housemates, Khandekar and Jones, got worried enough to call the police. The Find my iPhone function placed her still at the Marvin Hotel.

Also at 10, the cleaner came in to refresh and change the room for the next set of guests, which had the regrettable side effect of destroying any evidence that might have been on the sheets or towels. As it was, the cleaner noticed a small black chip in the trash can, but she didn't investigate or look closer at it before tossing everything in the garbage. (My theory, based on the description in her witness statement, was that this was probably Melinda's phone's SIM card, which would explain why her phone was still pinged at the Marvin.) Other than that black chip, the cleaner didn't notice anything unusual whatsoever in the hotel room.

10:43, the police show up at the Marvin hotel and are brought up to the cleaned room. Predictably, they find nothing in the room. This is possibly a result of it having been cleaned, or, and this is extremely likely to me, a result of the police just not doing their job. They took preliminary interviews of everyone involved, no follow ups, and then declared the case cold about a month later. (Is that even legal, you may ask? Everything is legal so long as it's the GCPD doing it.)

**So where does that leave us?**

There's no question in my mind that Henry Newmark was involved in Melinda Hernandez's disappearance. He was the last person she ever saw, he had a substantial political motive to kidnap and/or kill her, and he left town right after her disappearance? It's obvious who did it. What makes this really unresolved, though, is how he did it.

See, when Melinda Hernandez joins Newmark in his room, that's the last time she's ever caught on tape at all. Nobody goes in or out of Newmark's room until he leaves the next morning. There are even some feeds of the windows outside from across the street: nobody comes in and out by the window either, which is a real concern in Gotham. Even if you say that that footage could be edited: this is a major thoroughfare with plenty of college students out late on a Saturday night, and Newmark's window faced the street, so if Melinda did go out the window -- the only other opening in the entire hotel room besides the front door -- there would have been plenty of witnesses to a person exiting off the 5th story. Let alone the fact that you'd have to be really careful as a normal person and not Batman to not fall to your death.

For all intents and purposes, Melinda Hernandez just vanished into thin air from the Marvin Hotel. How?

**Sources:**

The Charley Project

Gotham Gazette, Sunday 8/27

The Oracle Directory

**56 comments share save hide give gold report crosspost **

sorted by:  **best (suggested)**

> [-] **Moderator • MaskOffMaskOn** 419 points 10 hours ago
> 
> Yes, this technically violates our rules about no cases from the past 6 months, BUT we are making an exception for two reasons. 1) It's pretty clear that law enforcement in Gotham has no intention of continuing to investigate this case. 2) We're also curious to see if Batman has a Reddit account.
> 
> **permalink embed save report give gold reply **
>
>> |  | 
>> 
>> [-] **redrobinyummmmm** 1.4k points 10 hours ago (18) (4)
>> 
>> Well, I'm not exactly Batman, but I hope that's not too big a disappointment. I've been looking into this case myself and I think I have a few leads. Best wishes to the Hernandez family; I'm confident we'll find your daughter.
>> 
>> **permalink embed save report give gold reply **
>> 
>> |  | 
>> 
>> [-] **IfTheShoeTits** 302 points 10 hours ago
>> 
>> Holy shit. I don't believe that's Red Robin. I refuse.
>> 
>> **permalink embed save report give gold reply **  
>>   
>> ---|---  
>> | 
>> 
>> [-] **redrobinyummmmm** 1.4k points 10 hours ago (6) (1)
>> 
>> How about now?
>> 
>> **permalink embed save report give gold reply **  
>>   
>> ---|---  
>  
>> [-] **markovChained** 82 points 18 hours ago
>> 
>> Has anyone looked into Newmark's uncle? If he's on the GCPD and the GCPD are bungling this investigation, maybe it's a case of having to look out for your dumb, murderous nephew.
>> 
>> **permalink embed save report give gold reply **
>> 
>> |  | 
>> 
>> [-] **uncle-lchaim** 58 points 18 hours ago
>> 
>> I'm not from Gotham, or the US, but I get the sense that even if they weren't family, looking the other way isn't exactly unusual. Especially if it seems like "whoever" kidnapped Melinda is doing the GCPD a favor.
>> 
>> **permalink embed save report give gold reply **  
>>   
>> ---|---  
>>  
>>> | 
>>> 
>>> [-] **PM-me-nightwings-ass** 17 points 15 hours ago
>>> 
>>> Looked him up on Open Oversight: Joshua Newmark is still an active cop on the GCPD, but not a detective. 
>>> 
>>> **permalink embed save report give gold reply **  
>>>   
>>> ---|---  
>>   
>> [-] **Magic-the-Blathering** -12 points 14 hours ago
>> 
>> Your anti-secession and anti-cop bias is showing through so hard right now. Really? Just because she happened to be a junior aide to a politician, you think the cops wouldn't be fair? It's not like someone kidnapped the mayor or anything. She's not that important in the grand scheme of things; it probably genuinely just is a cold case.
>> 
>> **permalink embed save report give gold reply **
>> 
>> |  | 
>> 
>> [-] **gothamlurkerthrowaway** 42 points 10 hours ago
>> 
>> I wouldn't trust a Gotham cop to be fair and non-corrupt if the lives of two million people literally depended on it. Considering that's what happens every single day.
>> 
>> **permalink embed save report give gold reply **  
>>   
>> ---|---  
>>  
>>> | 
>>> 
>>> [-] **Magic-the-Blathering** -3 points 10 hours ago
>>> 
>>> If you don't like it in this city, you can just leave. Seriously. Everyone acts like Gotham secession would nullify US citizenship but when it happens, everyone who doesn't want to stay can just run back to the US like they did during the earthquake. It's a win-win for both sides, I have no idea why anti-secessionists want to keep us chained to the mainland so badly. 
>>> 
>>> **permalink embed save report give gold reply **  
>>>   
>>> ---|---  
>>>  
>>>> | 
>>>> 
>>>> [-] **gothamlurkerthrowaway** 5 points 7 hours ago
>>>> 
>>>> I was born and raised here. I like Gotham just fine. Doesn't mean I have to like the GCPD. 
>>>> 
>>>> **permalink embed save report give gold reply **  
>>>>   
>>>> ---|---  
>   
>   
> 
> 
> [-] **excelsior-rising** 82 points 18 hours ago
> 
> "For all intents and purposes, Melinda Hernandez just vanished into thin air from the Marvin Hotel."  
>    
>  What if she did? After all, it's not like magic is ultra-rare. Zatanna's always fighting someone pulling rabbits out of hats somewhere in the lower 48. Plus, it's not like aliens with good tech don't exist, or even humans: Lex Luthor, anyone? If this is about something as major as the creation of an entirely new country, plenty of people could get involved.
> 
> **permalink embed save report give gold reply **
> 
> |  | 
> 
> [-] **WebDM** 22 points 18 hours ago
> 
> One detail that's been niggling at me is that Newmark packed bags, plural; why? If it was a short weekend trip, like he said, what could he possibly have needed that would require two bags? Lex Luthor might be a bit of a stretch: even with the formation of a possible micro-country on the table, I doubt he'd get involved in a kidnapping so pedestrian we even know pretty much who did it, but it's not totally out of the realm of consideration for me that Newmark might have stumbled on some alien tech or a magic thing that let him transport people places. (Or, in a more gruesome vein: Dispose of the bodies.)
> 
> **permalink embed save report give gold reply **  
>   
> ---|---  
>  
>> | 
>> 
>> [-] **AndronicaGothicaaa** 3 points 9 hours ago
>> 
>> Yeah, but Batman said no metas in Gotham. 
>> 
>> **permalink embed save report give gold reply **  
>>   
>> ---|---  
  
**Author's Note:**

> it took me longer to make the reddit format than anything else in this fic so if you see something wrong, no you didn't <33 apologies to anyone who tried to view this on either mobile or with the creator skins off. no idea what you saw, but apologies.
> 
> batcest shippers dni, everyone else have a great day!


End file.
